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FOR this week, at least, the black-cloaked figure most important
to Joanna Rowling is a United States federal judge who will decide
whether to stop publication of a proposed encyclopedia of the world
of boy wizard Harry Potter.

The so-called Harry Potter Lexicon was nothing but
"wholesale theft" based on a "gutting" of her original work, the
series' creator, known as J.K. Rowling, told a Manhattan court on
Monday.

An emotional, nervous and, at times, tearful Ms Rowling, whose
seven Potter books have sold 400 million copies worldwide, told of
her struggle to write when she was a single mother, living on
welfare and deciding sometimes between buying food or a typewriter
ribbon.

"I really don't want to cry, because I'm British," Ms Rowling
said before adding that the Harry Potter series meant everything to
her.

"Those books, they saved me, and not just in a material sense.
There was a time when they saved my sanity," she said. "It was a
place I liked to vanish and it was a discipline in keeping me
sane."

Ms Rowling and the movie studio Warner Bros are claiming
copyright infringement to stop a small Michigan publisher, RDR
Books, from publishing what it promised would be the definitive
Harry Potter encyclopedia.

Ms Rowling said she supported numerous books commenting on the
Harry Potter series but the RDR manuscript was "atrocious", "dire",
"sloppy" and "lazy". It relied on wholesale copying of her work and
abridging her plots.

"What does it add?" she asked. "The idea of my readership
parting with their or their parents' hard-earned cash for this; I
think it's a travesty."

The title's nominated author is a librarian, Steven Vander Ark,
who first created the work as a fan website, and who was approached
last August by RDR Books' founder, Roger Rapoport, to convert the
web material to a print version.

Ms Rowling said she gave Mr Vander Ark's website an award in
2004 because it showed a passion for the Harry Potter series and
she saw no harm in it. But unlike legitimate commentaries, she said
it added nothing to understanding the books or the ideas that
inspired them.

She said her case was not about money; there was a principle at
stake.

Two books written for a children's charity, which had raised
$US30 million ($32 million), had been gutted for the lexicon,
undermining future fund-raising, Ms Rowling said. Other charity
books were also threatened.

Mr Rapoport defended his claim to a prospective co-publisher
that the book was written by 20 academic scholars and experts. He
conceded that there were no literature graduates among the
contributors, but as fans they were experts.

"It's not unlike wikipedia," he said of the lexicon's
creation.

A lawyer for RDR, Anthony Falcone, said the book was a
legitimate attempt to organise and discuss Harry Potter's complex
world. "If this book is suppressed, the public will lose out on a
valuable reference guide," he said.

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